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Tag: upgrade

vCloud Director architecture consist of multiple cells that share common database. The upgrade process involves shutting down services on all cells, upgrading them, upgrading the database and starting the cells. In large environments where there are three or more cells this can be quite labor intensive.

vCloud Director 8.20 brings new feature – an orchestrated upgrade. All cells and vCloud database can be upgraded with a single command from the primary cell VM. This brings two advantages. Simplicity – it is no longer needed to login to each cell VM, upload binaries and execute upgrade process manually. Availability – downtime during the upgrade maintenance window is reduced.

Prerequisites

Set up ssh private key login from the primary cell to all other cells in the vCloud Director instance for user vcloud.

Copy public key to each additional cell in the instance to authorized_keys file. This can be done with one line command ran from the primary cell or with this ssh-copy-id. Use IP/FQDN it is registered with in VCD

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I have upgraded my vSphere lab cluster from ESXi 5.1 to 5.5. Even though my lab consists only of 2 hosts I wanted to use Update Manager orchestrated upgrade to simulate how it would be done in big enterprise or service provider environment with as little manual steps as possible.

As I use Cisco Nexus 1000V and vCloud Director following procedure was devised:

1. It is not recommended to put a host into maintenance mode without first disabling it in vCloud Director. The reason is that vCloud Director catalog media management can get confused by inaccessibility of a host due maintenance mode. However when using Update Manager it is not possible to orchestrate disabling a host before maintenance mode. Therefore I would recommend to do the whole upgrade operation during maintenance window when vCloud Director portal is not accessible to end-users.

2. I have a few custom vibs installed on the hosts. Cisco 1000V VEM vib, vcloud agent vib, VXLAN vib. Other common are NetApp NFS plugin or EMC PowerPath. This means a custom ESXi 5.5 image must be created first. This can be done quite easily in PowerCLI 5.5 Note VXLAN vib does not need to be included as it is installed automatically when host exits maintenance mode (similar to FDM HA vib).

8. Now we can upload the iso to Update Manager, create upgrade baseline and attach it to the cluster.

9. When I run “Scan for Updates” I received status “Incompatible”. VMware Update Manager release notes mention this:

The Incompatible compliance status is because of the way the FDM (HA) agent is installed on ESXi 5.x hosts. Starting with vSphere 5.0, the FDM agent is installed on ESXi hosts as a VIB. When a VIB is installed or updated on an ESXi host, a flag is set to signify that the bootbank on the host has been updated. Update Manager checks for this flag while performing an upgrade scan or remediation and requires this flag to be cleared before upgrading a host. The flag can be cleared by rebooting the host.

I rebooted the hosts and Scanned for Updates again this time without any issue. I was ready for upgrade.

10. The upgrade of my two hosts took about 50 minutes. It was nicely orchestrated by Update Manager and finished without any issues.

11. I still needed to upgrade the vcloud host agents from vCloud Director, but that could be automated with vCloud API (host is put into maintenance mode during this operation).

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I see more and more customers are migrating from vCloud Director 1.5 to vCloud Director 5.1. One question they have is: “Do we have to migrate to vSphere 5.1 at the same time”? The answer is definite no. vCloud Director 5.1 supports vCenter 5.0 and ESXi 5.0 and even ESX(i) 4.0U2 if managed by vCenter 5.

I always recommend to upgrade vCloud Director in two phases.

Phase 1 (vCloud Director Upgrade)

vCloud Director Cell operating system (RHEL). RHEL 5 is still supported but if customer wants to use RHEL 6 he will need to deploy a new cell as RHEL 5 to RHEL 6 upgrade is not possible.

vCloud Director runtime upgrade

vCloud Director database schema upgrade

vShield Manager upgrade

vShield Edges upgrade

Phase 2 (vSphere Upgrade)

Installation of SSO

Installation of Inventory Service

Installation/upgrade of Web Client

vCenter Server upgrade

ESX hosts upgrade

distributed virtual switches upgrade

As the phases can be spread out in time this brings the main topic of the article – which new vCloud Director 5.1 features depend on vSphere 5.1 and will not be available during the time between Phase 1 and Phase 2? I have compiled a table which lists the new vCloud Director features and if that feature will be available with vSphere 5.0 (vCenter 5.0 + ESX 5.0. Note: I don’t dare to consider ESX 4).